Maria Fernanda de Abreu: "Iberia, Searching for Literary Identity: A Stone Raft?"
Assuming as starting points:1) a geocultural Iberian space; 2) an Iberian singularity, in contrast with other identitarian clusters, in cultural or literary fields; 3) a pan-regional, multinational and plurilinguistic identity within the European context, the Iberian Peninsula has come to be considered as an identitarian mega-frame, between the most restricted national identities which form it, and the wider European one. We propose, therefore, to discuss some of the "foundations" –anthropological, geographical or any other- which have been used by the narration of Iberian literary history to maintain that singularity.
Maria Graciete Besse: "Reconfigurations of Iberism, between Passion and Utopia"
We will try to propose a reflection on Iberism, understood as a dynamic and evolutionary concept in its literary reconfiguration. To that end, we will design a cartography which runs from Antero de Quental to José Saramago, and includes namely Miguel Torga, Natália Correia, Eduardo Lourenço and João de Melo. We will underline the way in which the federalist project, promoted by the 19th-century political and cultural values that looked for solutions for the "decadence of the peninsular peoples", considerably transformed itself throughout the 20th century, converging both on the utopic/distopic allegory of the "stone raft", and on the abridged expression of a fundamental Iberian "strangeness", never ceasing to create interesting discussions.
Helena Buffery: "Catalonian Identity in the Translation Zone"
This contribution will draw on different aspects of my work on the construction and representation of identity in the Catalan cultural space, reflecting on its relationship with other identities within the Iberian Peninsula. It will draw principally on approaches and insights from Translation Studies, in order to identify and explore different ways in which the process of translation has contributed to current understandings of Iberian identities. Beginning by rehearsing the more common accounts of the operation of translation in zones of cultural contact characterized by uneven power relationships (drawing principally on Systems Theory and Postcolonial approaches), I will go on to discuss how the cultural function of translation has been read in studies of 19th and 20th century Catalan cultural history before addressing contemporary constructions through the prism of what Emily Apter calls the Translation Zone. Whilst the examples used will be taken from contemporary Catalan cultural production, I will engage with the ways in which they construct, represent and interact with other Iberian cultures and communities.
César Domínguez: "Literatures in Spain: European Literature, World-literature, World Literature?"
From a metageographical point of view, the Iberian peninsula's three distinctive features have been its peripherality, isolation and minorization within the European continent. Furthermore, its plurilingualism and multiculturalism have led to an amalgamation of these three features into a vision of the peninsula as a self-sufficient entity, a sort of microcosm whose spatial identity is linked to a cronopolitics of difference as opposed to Europe. Consequentially, the several Iberian cultures have been fighting against, on the one hand, their inferior degree of "Europeanness" and, on the other hand, the homogeneization promoted by the European Other, which the Iberian Self has constructed as different versions of ethno-centrism and, more significantly, Castilian-centrism. In literary terms, this European Other/Iberian Self opposition has been translated into diverging narratives/histories of the Iberian literatures, a genre which was born in Europe and to which Iberia responded. The aim of this paper is to explore one of the most relevant moments of this process, namely the fin de siècle, through four peripheral narratives, the Spanish trans-Atlantic rim, Portugal, Galicia, and Catalonia. These peripheral narratives shed light on the role Iberian literatures may play within European and world literature.
Ângela Fernandes: "Iberian and Romance Identities: The Literary Background"
The place of an Iberian cultural identity within the Romance world seems to be a rather neglected issue, probably due to its scarce polemic potential nowadays. The discussion of a Romance identity, with its roots in Roman classical culture and in Latin language, has lost most of its allure during the 20th century, as new topics of geo-cultural tension became more relevant. The Romance background is nevertheless an essential clue to understand Iberian cultures. My presentation aims at revisiting the history and the contemporary situation of Iberian and Romance cultural identities, considering not only the Latin matrix of Western world but also the literary dimension of such powerful ideas and images. The novel Um deus passeando pela brisa da tarde [A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening], published in 1994 by the Portuguese author Mário de Carvalho, will be the point of departure to this reflection.
Derek Flitter: "North and South: Iberian Identity Formation in Romanticism and post-Romanticism"
Romantic theories of literature enable the figuration, within the Iberian Peninsula, of a ‘Northern’ poetic consciousness applicable especially to its Atlantic seaboard and conditioning the construction of distinctive literary landscapes differentiated from ‘Southern’ or Mediterranean entailments. Closely related to northern European conceptions of the Sublime and to an aesthetic preference for abstracted metaphysical speculation, this phenomenon profoundly affects the recreation of mediaeval Spain within Spanish Romanticism proper, and is, in turn, expropriated by the dominant discourse of the Galician "Rexurdimento" of the later nineteenth century. Mediaeval and early modern Spain become a locus for the rehearsal of Iberian identities within the prism of northern European Romantic theory, and their evocation a means of testing aesthetic limits.
Esther Gimeno Ugalde: "Reasserting Identities: Iberian Cultures and (Language) Diversity in Contemporary Cinema"
Just as the number of coproductions in the Spanish film industry is increasing and examples of transnational films (often spoken in English) destined for the international audience are proliferating (Los otros by Alejandro Amenábar, Los crímenes de Oxford by Alex de la Iglesia, Mi vida sin mí by Isabel Coixet, Biutifil by Alejandro González Iñárritu, etc.), so is growing the interest in films intended to consolidate local identities and to reflect the cultural and linguistic plurality in the Iberian peninsula. So, although it is true that global cinema and transnational films dominate our screens most of the time, it is also undeniable that there is renewed interest in the cinema world in reaffirming local and cultural identities. Proof of that are some of the successful films of the last decades framed in a very specific geographic, cultural and, in some cases, linguistic context. We have in mind films such as La teta I la lluna (Bigas Luna 1994), A lingua das borboretas (José Luis Cuerda 1999), Solas (Benito Zambrano 1999), Salvador (Manuel Huerga 2006) or Pa negre (Agustí Villaronga 2010), but also some minority cinema, less well known but of equal interest, i.e. Aupa Etxebeste! (Asier Altuna/Telmo Esnal 2005), Kutsidazu Bidea Ixabel/Enséñame el camino, Isabel (Fernando Bernués 2006), El coronel Macià (Josep Maria Forn 2006), Zorion perfektua/Felicidad perfecta (Jabi Elortegi 2009), Izarren argia/Estrellas que alcanzar (Mikel Rueda 2010).
Cinema, as a reflection of culture and at the same time as a producer of it, helps to create the collective imaginaries and communal identity such as the Spanish, the Catalan, the Basque, the Andalusian, etc. Working with a small corpus of films and looking at the history of Spanish cinema from the transition to the present date, this presentation will formulate different (and polemical) questions with regard to the role of national identities in the cinema: to what extent are the different collective imaginaries of the Peninsula represented in the cinema? What role do communal memories and literatures play in search of topics dear to the communal heart? What symbology and cultural aspects are used particularly to create self-defining, differentiated scenes? What role does the language play in the creation of identities in the cinema? In addition to these aspects, the presentation will look at the problem of defining what is meant by Basque, Galician or Andalusian cinema compared to a much more established and accepted concept such as Catalan cinema.
Jon Kortazar: "Kirmen Uribe’s Novel and Identity in Complex Societies"
This presentation aims at analyzing some of the key aspects of Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (2008). We will show how national identity is questioned through the creation of political transversalities or personal relations which supersede political positions, and which may be understood in the context of post-national identity.
John Macklin: "Modernism and Modernity: Iberian Perspectives"
In this paper I shall revisit some of my work in the 1980s on modernism and modernity in Spain as a stimulus to developing new thinking on the concept of the Iberian literary space. My work at that time aimed, in the immediate post-Franco era, to locate Spanish writing of the early twentieth century in a wider European context as a challenge to the purely national(ist) perspective of contemporary Spanish literary historiography which had in turn influenced British Hispanism at that time.
Since that time our knowledge of, and theoretical approaches to, the idea of cultural exchange have been expanded and interrogated. In brief, a focus on the solitary literary genius, then on period and genre, on particular sites of production, have given way to a preoccupation with the diversity of modes of cultural exchange, circulation and transformation. Modernity and Modernism, the artistic expression of the crisis of modernity, are increasingly seen as multiple and complex, not reducible to a specific time or set of aesthetic practices. Interaction with other political and intellectual agendas, with issues of race, internationalism, feminism, postcolonialism, environmentalism, the body, identity, and so on, are frequently explored through a concern with networks, identifications, reactions and assimilations. The paper will explore how our notion of the Iberian literary space is enriched, extended and disturbed by increasingly complex cultural and ideological dialogues.
Gabriel Magalhães: "Europe, the Letter of Numbers. From the Alpha of Iberian Comparative Literature to the Omega of European Comparative Literature"
In the current situation of European crisis, which threatens to take us to a landscape of disintegration, could Comparative Literature work as the beginning of an horizon? From the 19th century onwards, comparative Iberian Studies have been developed in the field of literature, somehow looking for the enigma of our Peninsula. What results did we get, in the end? And this travel that we have already made, could it inspire a wider European initiative? Is it possible to go beyond current Europe, lost in the labyrinth of its numbers, to a more comprehensive conception of the continent? What role would literature play in that desired alchemy? These are the questions that will guide the course of our research.
Ferenc Pál: "Do the Portuguese Toot Merrily? The Image of Portugal and Portuguese History and People in Hungary during the 19th Century (Theoretic Questions of its Reception)"
It is well known that in the 19th century the Portuguese poet, Camões was well known in Hungary, and we can say that there was a real cult of Camões: his name was mentioned many times, he became character of novels and poems, and historians debated about the Hungarian origin of the Portuguese dynasty, mentioned in the 25th stanza of the 3rd Canto of his epic poem The Lusiads. In our lecture we would like to analyse how this cult of Camões influenced the image of Portugal and Portuguese people in the 19th and 20th centuries in Hungary.
Craig Patterson: "Galician Identity and Race: a Postcolonial Reading of Castelao"
The focus on race and identity in the works of Galician writers has fallen almost exclusively upon Vicente Risco. Although Risco’s anti-Semitic comments in his writings largely account for this, it is also unquestionably related to his support for the Franco regime. The apostate theoretician of Galician nationalism has been an easy target given criticism’s reluctance to cast the same scrutinous glare over other Galician writers considered indispensable to the normalisation of a minority national culture.
Castelao, the symbolic figurehead of Galician nationalism, voices clearly racist ideas regarding Black and Jewish culture in his public and private writings during the 1930s and early 40s. However, he later regrets these ideas after formative experiences in the United States and Latin America during exile, a period when his work also displays a movement away from purely essentialist notions of place and identity.
This paper will explore the complexities of Castelao’s relationship with race and identity by examining his published work, notebooks and visual art. Through reference to critical theory on race, it will seek to place Castelao within a wider context of exile and diaspora writing, as well as reflect upon the implications for his status within Galician culture today.
Santiago Pérez Isasi: "Iberian Studies: A State of the Art and Future Perspectives"
The area of Iberian Studies has been increasingly growing during the last decades, as an alternative to the more monolithic (and traditionally monolinguistic) studies on Spanish or Portuguese (or Basque, Galician, Catalan) language and literature. Recent publications, conferences, departments, research groups and projects on Iberian Studies show a growing trend towards interdisciplinarity, which could derive from merely institutional reasons in some cases, and in others be a result of a passing fancy; but which could also be understood as a result of the exhaustion of traditional, national philological models and of the development of a transnational and comparative approach to Iberian literary phenomena. In any case, the field of Iberian Studies is still a highly fragmented one, which still lacks a solid theoretical foundation and a clear definition of its object, methodology and objectives. This first presentation will therefore try to offer a very brief review of the State of the Art in the field of Iberian Studies, both in the Iberian Peninsula and abroad, and will also risk to offer a tentative definition of its limits, configuration and perspective of future development.
Teresa Pinheiro: "Iberian and European Studies – Archaeology of a New Epistemological Field"
In the last decade, we have been witnessing the institutionalisation of European Studies in European universities. The emergence of this new field of academic studies is related to the process of European integration and to the increasing popularity of Area Studies in Europe. Though Iberian Studies are still much related to a tradition of philological studies, there have been some recent attempts to institutionalise this epistemological field within European Studies.
In my contribution, I would like to outline some theoretical and thematic foundations of Iberian Studies as a field of study in its intersection with European Studies as practised in Western European Universities.
Cristina Almeida Ribeiro: "Is there Iberia in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times?"
To speak of Iberia conceived as a more than geographic unit has become so natural nowadays that we almost forget that such a perception did not exist for centuries, neither for the intellectuals nor for the rulers. When we go back to late medieval times and get aware of the hegemonic ambitions aiming the domination of the peninsular territory, we understand that in the horizon of the kings there was no will of dominating a homogeneous space simply known as Iberia – a meaningless word by then –, but rather the will of adding to their names an enlarged list of domains, that, for their juxtaposition, would bring to light the glory of their conquests or the extent of their political views. Reverberating over the cultural and literary milieu the rivalry existing at social and political levels, the activity of poets was also developed under that emulation principle, which, claimed or dissimulated, led each national group to the search of its own identity to be fulfilled by means of superiority or of difference. And yet it is impossible not to recognize that historical reality favoured an intensive cultural exchange, which, in the rhythm of alliances and confrontations, embassies and exiles, made possible the emergence of elective affinities as well as the constitution of common frames of reference that appear to give the 21st century scholars a reason to study in their specificities Iberian songbooks or Iberian pastoral novel.
Juan M. Ribera Llopis: "Center-Peninsular Considerations on the Catalan Literary Regeneration"
It is necessary to attend to the documentation which may offer proof of the degree of reception and the critical discourse established by the (historically stable) Castilian literary system by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, towards the Galician and Catalan literary regenerations –considered as "regional literatures", exponents of "minorized" literary systems. The recognition of the Iberian Peninsula as an "interliterary area", configured as a space with a center and some peripheries, allows to provide those spatial categories with a double meaning: from a geographical point of view, in which they define an equidistant center, and from the perspective of the historical and cultural exclusion. In the same way, the category of "periphery" allows us to better understand the interest, from the Portuguese side, for these regeneration movements that were Spanish from a geopolitical point of view, but culturally Iberian. We will focus on the chronology mentioned above, because we consider that this is the time when Galician and Catalan regeneration movements create their own models for their cultural systems, which have determined their contemporary evolution.
The Spanish writer and diplomat Juan Valera, from his first stay in Lisbon (1850), developed an intense activity of readings, criticism and personal relations with his Portuguese contemporaries. From his contributions in Revista Peninsular (1855-6) to his last novel Morsamor (1899), he left plenty of proof of this activity. In this presentation we will discuss the concepts of "nation" and "civilization", as used by Valera to explain his idea of what had been and should be the relations between the Iberian countries.
Jaume Subirana: "Who we are. Eight young Catalan novelists write about national identity"
With the appearance in the last years, on the one hand, of a new generation of brilliant writers, which have no link with the coordenates of Francoism and, on the other hand, with the increase and transformation of the population of Catalonia (in ten years, from 2000 to 2010, it grew from 6 to 7 millions, that extra million of citizens consisting mainly of foreigners), the topic of Catalan identity (or identities), the look on the country itself and even the attempt to give a name to its inhabitants have made their way into the bookstores, transformed into books which, in some cases, were most welcome by the public. As a tool for reflection, these young writers use literary fiction, rather than the essay, including all possible forms and genres (novel and short stories, of course, but also journalistic articles and reports, pseudobiographies, personal memoirs...).
Jüri Talvet: "How to Research Iberian Literatures from a Comparative European Perspective? Premises and Contexts"
In my paper I will try to characterize the present state of comparative literary studies in Europe and the world, showing its advances along with serious gaps both in theory and practice. I will develop my ideas and concepts as postulated in my article “Edaphos and Episteme of Comparative Literature” (Interlitteraria, 10, 2005, pp. 46-56), with a stress not so much on the reception of literature on the axis "text – reader" or "text – text", but centring on the premises and contexts of intercultural reception of literature, especially in relation with the concepts of “centres”, "peripheries" and "borders" (in this aspect relying on some ideas exposed in the late work of Yuri M. Lotman).
Roberto Vecchi: "Thinking from Europe of an Iberian 'South'"
Even if through a quite complex process, the European inscription of the Iberian Peninsula defines a Southern position and the conceptualization for it and, in a more general sense, for the national cultures composing Iberia.
In this way, Iberia always provokes a reconfiguration of the idea of the (European) south, in particular with other "South" (in a plural sense), such as the Italian "Meridione" defined in an extremely sharp and seminal way by Antonio Gramsci. From this point of view, it results quite interesting to wonder when the southern consciousness becomes crucial in the inner circle of the European reflection on Iberian cultures, such as it is plain in Antero de Quental’s lecture Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares nos últimos três séculos (1871) and, more in general, in the cultural fin-de-siècle peninsular horizon.
In this way, it is relevant to focus the Iberian context inside the movement of modernization, in particular how it "subjects" (in a double, Foucaultian mode) this space as its specific, intersubjective (that is, relational) South, in a proximity to the sphere of what, again with Gramsci, we can call a "subaltern" social space.
Contemporary Post-colonial and Cultural Studies, however projected inside and not outside Europe, can contribute to better configure such a process, providing with new tools and topics to interpret the "South" –even the Iberian South- as a cultural and political construction.
The purpose of my intervention is to define the limits of the concept called açorianidade according to a point of view coming from the other end of Europe, a view which is that of (or part of) the readers of Lusophone literature. Therefore, it emerges from the reading of literary texts from the Iberian and overseas countries. The analysis of this type of literature crosses the European continent from the East to the West and it undoubtedly finds itself contaminated. I assume that to define açorianidade only from the literary production perspective may be a rather risky attempt due to its limitations. I am running this risk and I am putting forward the hypothesis that the "literary açorianidade" once circumscribed, described or defined, will provide evidence and arguments for a definition as complete as possible of the açorianidade.
ABSTRACTS
Maria Fernanda de Abreu: "Iberia, Searching for Literary Identity: A Stone Raft?"
Assuming as starting points:1) a geocultural Iberian space; 2) an Iberian singularity, in contrast with other identitarian clusters, in cultural or literary fields; 3) a pan-regional, multinational and plurilinguistic identity within the European context, the Iberian Peninsula has come to be considered as an identitarian mega-frame, between the most restricted national identities which form it, and the wider European one. We propose, therefore, to discuss some of the "foundations" –anthropological, geographical or any other- which have been used by the narration of Iberian literary history to maintain that singularity.
Maria Graciete Besse: "Reconfigurations of Iberism, between Passion and Utopia"
We will try to propose a reflection on Iberism, understood as a dynamic and evolutionary concept in its literary reconfiguration. To that end, we will design a cartography which runs from Antero de Quental to José Saramago, and includes namely Miguel Torga, Natália Correia, Eduardo Lourenço and João de Melo. We will underline the way in which the federalist project, promoted by the 19th-century political and cultural values that looked for solutions for the "decadence of the peninsular peoples", considerably transformed itself throughout the 20th century, converging both on the utopic/distopic allegory of the "stone raft", and on the abridged expression of a fundamental Iberian "strangeness", never ceasing to create interesting discussions.
Helena Buffery: "Catalonian Identity in the Translation Zone"
This contribution will draw on different aspects of my work on the construction and representation of identity in the Catalan cultural space, reflecting on its relationship with other identities within the Iberian Peninsula. It will draw principally on approaches and insights from Translation Studies, in order to identify and explore different ways in which the process of translation has contributed to current understandings of Iberian identities. Beginning by rehearsing the more common accounts of the operation of translation in zones of cultural contact characterized by uneven power relationships (drawing principally on Systems Theory and Postcolonial approaches), I will go on to discuss how the cultural function of translation has been read in studies of 19th and 20th century Catalan cultural history before addressing contemporary constructions through the prism of what Emily Apter calls the Translation Zone. Whilst the examples used will be taken from contemporary Catalan cultural production, I will engage with the ways in which they construct, represent and interact with other Iberian cultures and communities.
César Domínguez: "Literatures in Spain: European Literature, World-literature, World Literature?"
From a metageographical point of view, the Iberian peninsula's three distinctive features have been its peripherality, isolation and minorization within the European continent. Furthermore, its plurilingualism and multiculturalism have led to an amalgamation of these three features into a vision of the peninsula as a self-sufficient entity, a sort of microcosm whose spatial identity is linked to a cronopolitics of difference as opposed to Europe. Consequentially, the several Iberian cultures have been fighting against, on the one hand, their inferior degree of "Europeanness" and, on the other hand, the homogeneization promoted by the European Other, which the Iberian Self has constructed as different versions of ethno-centrism and, more significantly, Castilian-centrism. In literary terms, this European Other/Iberian Self opposition has been translated into diverging narratives/histories of the Iberian literatures, a genre which was born in Europe and to which Iberia responded. The aim of this paper is to explore one of the most relevant moments of this process, namely the fin de siècle, through four peripheral narratives, the Spanish trans-Atlantic rim, Portugal, Galicia, and Catalonia. These peripheral narratives shed light on the role Iberian literatures may play within European and world literature.
Ângela Fernandes: "Iberian and Romance Identities: The Literary Background"
The place of an Iberian cultural identity within the Romance world seems to be a rather neglected issue, probably due to its scarce polemic potential nowadays. The discussion of a Romance identity, with its roots in Roman classical culture and in Latin language, has lost most of its allure during the 20th century, as new topics of geo-cultural tension became more relevant. The Romance background is nevertheless an essential clue to understand Iberian cultures. My presentation aims at revisiting the history and the contemporary situation of Iberian and Romance cultural identities, considering not only the Latin matrix of Western world but also the literary dimension of such powerful ideas and images. The novel Um deus passeando pela brisa da tarde [A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening], published in 1994 by the Portuguese author Mário de Carvalho, will be the point of departure to this reflection.
Derek Flitter: "North and South: Iberian Identity Formation in Romanticism and post-Romanticism"
Romantic theories of literature enable the figuration, within the Iberian Peninsula, of a ‘Northern’ poetic consciousness applicable especially to its Atlantic seaboard and conditioning the construction of distinctive literary landscapes differentiated from ‘Southern’ or Mediterranean entailments. Closely related to northern European conceptions of the Sublime and to an aesthetic preference for abstracted metaphysical speculation, this phenomenon profoundly affects the recreation of mediaeval Spain within Spanish Romanticism proper, and is, in turn, expropriated by the dominant discourse of the Galician "Rexurdimento" of the later nineteenth century. Mediaeval and early modern Spain become a locus for the rehearsal of Iberian identities within the prism of northern European Romantic theory, and their evocation a means of testing aesthetic limits.
Esther Gimeno Ugalde: "Reasserting Identities: Iberian Cultures and (Language) Diversity in Contemporary Cinema"
Just as the number of coproductions in the Spanish film industry is increasing and examples of transnational films (often spoken in English) destined for the international audience are proliferating (Los otros by Alejandro Amenábar, Los crímenes de Oxford by Alex de la Iglesia, Mi vida sin mí by Isabel Coixet, Biutifil by Alejandro González Iñárritu, etc.), so is growing the interest in films intended to consolidate local identities and to reflect the cultural and linguistic plurality in the Iberian peninsula. So, although it is true that global cinema and transnational films dominate our screens most of the time, it is also undeniable that there is renewed interest in the cinema world in reaffirming local and cultural identities. Proof of that are some of the successful films of the last decades framed in a very specific geographic, cultural and, in some cases, linguistic context. We have in mind films such as La teta I la lluna (Bigas Luna 1994), A lingua das borboretas (José Luis Cuerda 1999), Solas (Benito Zambrano 1999), Salvador (Manuel Huerga 2006) or Pa negre (Agustí Villaronga 2010), but also some minority cinema, less well known but of equal interest, i.e. Aupa Etxebeste! (Asier Altuna/Telmo Esnal 2005), Kutsidazu Bidea Ixabel/Enséñame el camino, Isabel (Fernando Bernués 2006), El coronel Macià (Josep Maria Forn 2006), Zorion perfektua/Felicidad perfecta (Jabi Elortegi 2009), Izarren argia/Estrellas que alcanzar (Mikel Rueda 2010).
Cinema, as a reflection of culture and at the same time as a producer of it, helps to create the collective imaginaries and communal identity such as the Spanish, the Catalan, the Basque, the Andalusian, etc. Working with a small corpus of films and looking at the history of Spanish cinema from the transition to the present date, this presentation will formulate different (and polemical) questions with regard to the role of national identities in the cinema: to what extent are the different collective imaginaries of the Peninsula represented in the cinema? What role do communal memories and literatures play in search of topics dear to the communal heart? What symbology and cultural aspects are used particularly to create self-defining, differentiated scenes? What role does the language play in the creation of identities in the cinema? In addition to these aspects, the presentation will look at the problem of defining what is meant by Basque, Galician or Andalusian cinema compared to a much more established and accepted concept such as Catalan cinema.
Jon Kortazar: "Kirmen Uribe’s Novel and Identity in Complex Societies"
This presentation aims at analyzing some of the key aspects of Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (2008). We will show how national identity is questioned through the creation of political transversalities or personal relations which supersede political positions, and which may be understood in the context of post-national identity.
John Macklin: "Modernism and Modernity: Iberian Perspectives"
In this paper I shall revisit some of my work in the 1980s on modernism and modernity in Spain as a stimulus to developing new thinking on the concept of the Iberian literary space. My work at that time aimed, in the immediate post-Franco era, to locate Spanish writing of the early twentieth century in a wider European context as a challenge to the purely national(ist) perspective of contemporary Spanish literary historiography which had in turn influenced British Hispanism at that time.
Since that time our knowledge of, and theoretical approaches to, the idea of cultural exchange have been expanded and interrogated. In brief, a focus on the solitary literary genius, then on period and genre, on particular sites of production, have given way to a preoccupation with the diversity of modes of cultural exchange, circulation and transformation. Modernity and Modernism, the artistic expression of the crisis of modernity, are increasingly seen as multiple and complex, not reducible to a specific time or set of aesthetic practices. Interaction with other political and intellectual agendas, with issues of race, internationalism, feminism, postcolonialism, environmentalism, the body, identity, and so on, are frequently explored through a concern with networks, identifications, reactions and assimilations. The paper will explore how our notion of the Iberian literary space is enriched, extended and disturbed by increasingly complex cultural and ideological dialogues.
Gabriel Magalhães: "Europe, the Letter of Numbers. From the Alpha of Iberian Comparative Literature to the Omega of European Comparative Literature"
In the current situation of European crisis, which threatens to take us to a landscape of disintegration, could Comparative Literature work as the beginning of an horizon? From the 19th century onwards, comparative Iberian Studies have been developed in the field of literature, somehow looking for the enigma of our Peninsula. What results did we get, in the end? And this travel that we have already made, could it inspire a wider European initiative? Is it possible to go beyond current Europe, lost in the labyrinth of its numbers, to a more comprehensive conception of the continent? What role would literature play in that desired alchemy? These are the questions that will guide the course of our research.
Ferenc Pál: "Do the Portuguese Toot Merrily? The Image of Portugal and Portuguese History and People in Hungary during the 19th Century (Theoretic Questions of its Reception)"
It is well known that in the 19th century the Portuguese poet, Camões was well known in Hungary, and we can say that there was a real cult of Camões: his name was mentioned many times, he became character of novels and poems, and historians debated about the Hungarian origin of the Portuguese dynasty, mentioned in the 25th stanza of the 3rd Canto of his epic poem The Lusiads. In our lecture we would like to analyse how this cult of Camões influenced the image of Portugal and Portuguese people in the 19th and 20th centuries in Hungary.
Craig Patterson: "Galician Identity and Race: a Postcolonial Reading of Castelao"
The focus on race and identity in the works of Galician writers has fallen almost exclusively upon Vicente Risco. Although Risco’s anti-Semitic comments in his writings largely account for this, it is also unquestionably related to his support for the Franco regime. The apostate theoretician of Galician nationalism has been an easy target given criticism’s reluctance to cast the same scrutinous glare over other Galician writers considered indispensable to the normalisation of a minority national culture.
Castelao, the symbolic figurehead of Galician nationalism, voices clearly racist ideas regarding Black and Jewish culture in his public and private writings during the 1930s and early 40s. However, he later regrets these ideas after formative experiences in the United States and Latin America during exile, a period when his work also displays a movement away from purely essentialist notions of place and identity.
This paper will explore the complexities of Castelao’s relationship with race and identity by examining his published work, notebooks and visual art. Through reference to critical theory on race, it will seek to place Castelao within a wider context of exile and diaspora writing, as well as reflect upon the implications for his status within Galician culture today.
Santiago Pérez Isasi: "Iberian Studies: A State of the Art and Future Perspectives"
The area of Iberian Studies has been increasingly growing during the last decades, as an alternative to the more monolithic (and traditionally monolinguistic) studies on Spanish or Portuguese (or Basque, Galician, Catalan) language and literature. Recent publications, conferences, departments, research groups and projects on Iberian Studies show a growing trend towards interdisciplinarity, which could derive from merely institutional reasons in some cases, and in others be a result of a passing fancy; but which could also be understood as a result of the exhaustion of traditional, national philological models and of the development of a transnational and comparative approach to Iberian literary phenomena. In any case, the field of Iberian Studies is still a highly fragmented one, which still lacks a solid theoretical foundation and a clear definition of its object, methodology and objectives. This first presentation will therefore try to offer a very brief review of the State of the Art in the field of Iberian Studies, both in the Iberian Peninsula and abroad, and will also risk to offer a tentative definition of its limits, configuration and perspective of future development.
Teresa Pinheiro: "Iberian and European Studies – Archaeology of a New Epistemological Field"
In the last decade, we have been witnessing the institutionalisation of European Studies in European universities. The emergence of this new field of academic studies is related to the process of European integration and to the increasing popularity of Area Studies in Europe. Though Iberian Studies are still much related to a tradition of philological studies, there have been some recent attempts to institutionalise this epistemological field within European Studies.
In my contribution, I would like to outline some theoretical and thematic foundations of Iberian Studies as a field of study in its intersection with European Studies as practised in Western European Universities.
Cristina Almeida Ribeiro: "Is there Iberia in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times?"
To speak of Iberia conceived as a more than geographic unit has become so natural nowadays that we almost forget that such a perception did not exist for centuries, neither for the intellectuals nor for the rulers. When we go back to late medieval times and get aware of the hegemonic ambitions aiming the domination of the peninsular territory, we understand that in the horizon of the kings there was no will of dominating a homogeneous space simply known as Iberia – a meaningless word by then –, but rather the will of adding to their names an enlarged list of domains, that, for their juxtaposition, would bring to light the glory of their conquests or the extent of their political views. Reverberating over the cultural and literary milieu the rivalry existing at social and political levels, the activity of poets was also developed under that emulation principle, which, claimed or dissimulated, led each national group to the search of its own identity to be fulfilled by means of superiority or of difference. And yet it is impossible not to recognize that historical reality favoured an intensive cultural exchange, which, in the rhythm of alliances and confrontations, embassies and exiles, made possible the emergence of elective affinities as well as the constitution of common frames of reference that appear to give the 21st century scholars a reason to study in their specificities Iberian songbooks or Iberian pastoral novel.
Juan M. Ribera Llopis: "Center-Peninsular Considerations on the Catalan Literary Regeneration"
It is necessary to attend to the documentation which may offer proof of the degree of reception and the critical discourse established by the (historically stable) Castilian literary system by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, towards the Galician and Catalan literary regenerations –considered as "regional literatures", exponents of "minorized" literary systems. The recognition of the Iberian Peninsula as an "interliterary area", configured as a space with a center and some peripheries, allows to provide those spatial categories with a double meaning: from a geographical point of view, in which they define an equidistant center, and from the perspective of the historical and cultural exclusion. In the same way, the category of "periphery" allows us to better understand the interest, from the Portuguese side, for these regeneration movements that were Spanish from a geopolitical point of view, but culturally Iberian. We will focus on the chronology mentioned above, because we consider that this is the time when Galician and Catalan regeneration movements create their own models for their cultural systems, which have determined their contemporary evolution.
Leonardo Romero Tobar: "Valera’s Iberism"
The Spanish writer and diplomat Juan Valera, from his first stay in Lisbon (1850), developed an intense activity of readings, criticism and personal relations with his Portuguese contemporaries. From his contributions in Revista Peninsular (1855-6) to his last novel Morsamor (1899), he left plenty of proof of this activity. In this presentation we will discuss the concepts of "nation" and "civilization", as used by Valera to explain his idea of what had been and should be the relations between the Iberian countries.
Jaume Subirana: "Who we are. Eight young Catalan novelists write about national identity"
With the appearance in the last years, on the one hand, of a new generation of brilliant writers, which have no link with the coordenates of Francoism and, on the other hand, with the increase and transformation of the population of Catalonia (in ten years, from 2000 to 2010, it grew from 6 to 7 millions, that extra million of citizens consisting mainly of foreigners), the topic of Catalan identity (or identities), the look on the country itself and even the attempt to give a name to its inhabitants have made their way into the bookstores, transformed into books which, in some cases, were most welcome by the public.
As a tool for reflection, these young writers use literary fiction, rather than the essay, including all possible forms and genres (novel and short stories, of course, but also journalistic articles and reports, pseudobiographies, personal memoirs...).
Jüri Talvet: "How to Research Iberian Literatures from a Comparative European Perspective? Premises and Contexts"
In my paper I will try to characterize the present state of comparative literary studies in Europe and the world, showing its advances along with serious gaps both in theory and practice. I will develop my ideas and concepts as postulated in my article “Edaphos and Episteme of Comparative Literature” (Interlitteraria, 10, 2005, pp. 46-56), with a stress not so much on the reception of literature on the axis "text – reader" or "text – text", but centring on the premises and contexts of intercultural reception of literature, especially in relation with the concepts of “centres”, "peripheries" and "borders" (in this aspect relying on some ideas exposed in the late work of Yuri M. Lotman).
Roberto Vecchi: "Thinking from Europe of an Iberian 'South'"
Even if through a quite complex process, the European inscription of the Iberian Peninsula defines a Southern position and the conceptualization for it and, in a more general sense, for the national cultures composing Iberia.
In this way, Iberia always provokes a reconfiguration of the idea of the (European) south, in particular with other "South" (in a plural sense), such as the Italian "Meridione" defined in an extremely sharp and seminal way by Antonio Gramsci. From this point of view, it results quite interesting to wonder when the southern consciousness becomes crucial in the inner circle of the European reflection on Iberian cultures, such as it is plain in Antero de Quental’s lecture Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares nos últimos três séculos (1871) and, more in general, in the cultural fin-de-siècle peninsular horizon.
In this way, it is relevant to focus the Iberian context inside the movement of modernization, in particular how it "subjects" (in a double, Foucaultian mode) this space as its specific, intersubjective (that is, relational) South, in a proximity to the sphere of what, again with Gramsci, we can call a "subaltern" social space.
Contemporary Post-colonial and Cultural Studies, however projected inside and not outside Europe, can contribute to better configure such a process, providing with new tools and topics to interpret the "South" –even the Iberian South- as a cultural and political construction.
Crina Voinea: "Açorianidade(s): Identity, narrative, myth"
The purpose of my intervention is to define the limits of the concept called açorianidade according to a point of view coming from the other end of Europe, a view which is that of (or part of) the readers of Lusophone literature. Therefore, it emerges from the reading of literary texts from the Iberian and overseas countries. The analysis of this type of literature crosses the European continent from the East to the West and it undoubtedly finds itself contaminated. I assume that to define açorianidade only from the literary production perspective may be a rather risky attempt due to its limitations. I am running this risk and I am putting forward the hypothesis that the "literary açorianidade" once circumscribed, described or defined, will provide evidence and arguments for a definition as complete as possible of the açorianidade.